fancy you can prevail against me? For it is I, Si-Hamid—I, who am invulnerable—I whom the very fire burns, but cannot devour!'
"With that, I thrust my right hand into the flame of a Chinese gaming-lamp, and being saturated with the white man's perfume, it blazed up bravely, even to my elbow, doing me no hurt, while I waved it flaming above my head.
"Verily the white men are very clever, who so cunningly devise the medicine of these perfumes.
"Now, when all the people in the gambling-house saw that my hand and arm were burned with fire, but were not consumed, a great fear fell upon them, and they fled shrieking, no man staying to gather up his silver. This presently I counted and put into sacks, and my youths bore it to my house, and my fame waxed very great in Klang. Men said that henceforth Si-Hamid should be named, not the Tiger Unbound, but the Fiery Rhinoceros.[1] It was long ere the nature of my stratagem became known; and even then no man of all the many who were within the gambling-house at Klang that night had the hardihood or the imprudence to ask me for
- ↑ Bâdak api, the Fiery Rhinoceros, a monster of ancient Malayan myth. It is supposed to have quitted the earth in the company of the dragon and the lion at the instance of the magician Sang Kĕlĕmbai. The latter, whose spoken word turned to stone all animate and inanimate things that he addresser, fed the earth through fear of mankind, of whose size and strength he had obtained a mistaken impression. This arose from the sight of a man's sârong hanging from the top of a tall bamboo, upon which it had been placed when the yielding stem was pulled down to within a man's reach, and by the discovery of a little, glassy-headed, toothless man asleep in a hammock, whom Sang Kĕlĕmbai mistook for a newly born infant. Before his departure, he inadvertently taught mankind how to make and use a casting-net.
